Pathologies of Capitalism

Economic Crisis & Neocolonial Wars

The world economy is entering what George Magnus, a senior economic adviser to Switzerland’s UBS bank, has described as “a once-in-a-generation crisis
of capitalism, the footprints of which can be found in widespread challenges to the
political order” (Financial Times, 12 September 2011). The three largest imperialist
centers—the U.S., European Union and Japan—are locked in a seemingly
intractable downward spiral in synchronized, but distinct, crises.

Popular anxiety about a looming collapse has been magnified by the inability of the
ruling elites to provide any semblance of a rational plan to reverse or even manage a
rapidly deteriorating economic situation. This is reflected in a significant decline in
the popular legitimacy of individual political leaders and their parties, as well as in
the core institutions of capitalist rule.

After two decades of economic stagnation following the implosion of a 1980s real estate
bubble, revelations that the Japanese government had deliberately withheld vital
information on the diffusion of poisonous radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster
pushed public confidence to a new low. Meanwhile, the Eurozone debt crisis, which
continues to metastasize, threatens to trigger a global financial meltdown. Attempts to
redress the problems created by the accumulated debts of Europe’s financiers through
savage austerity attacks on working-class living standards are encountering growing, and
potentially seriously destabilizing, resistance.

Even in the U.S.—the biggest and most powerful imperialist country, with the most
backward working class—popular disenchantment with the system of unregulated
“free enterprise” is reaching proportions not seen since the Great Depression
of the 1930s. The widespread appeal of the politically primitive “Occupy Wall
Street” movement (which correctly identified the social dominance of the top
“1%” as the core problem in American society) points to the possibility of
major eruptions of political and social unrest in the coming period.

The following is the text of a presentation given in Toronto by Tom Riley on 24
September 2011.

The accumulation of “stresses” in the global financial system in recent
months recalls the run-up to the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers—an event
that very nearly led to a total international meltdown. It turns out that all the claims
over the past few years about how government stimulus, bank bailouts and tightened
regulations had put the global economy on the road to a solid “recovery” were
false. The bankers were rescued when their bad debts were nationalized, and the injection
of government stimulus funding into most major economies averted a complete collapse. But
the problems that led to the banking crisis and subsequent recession three years ago have
not disappeared, and the stop-gap measures taken to stave off disaster appear to have only
magnified the problem.

It is clear that at the moment the big three capitalist economies—the U.S., EU
and Japan—are stalling. It is also clear that the “emerging markets” of
Brazil, Russia, India and the Chinese deformed workers’ state—all of which
depend on exports to the more developed capitalist countries—cannot save the day.
Some prominent bourgeois economists—notably Carmen Reinhart of the Peterson
Institute for International Economics in Washington, and Harvard’s Kenneth
Rogoff—have declared that we are at the beginning of the “Second Great
Contraction,” the first, of course, being the “Great Depression” of the
1930s.

The business press is now reluctantly acknowledging that the “recovery” is
over and the global economy is likely to be in a slump until consumers get out there and
start spending again. In the meantime, everyone is supposed to grit their teeth and get
ready for the kind of painful austerity we have been seeing in Greece. Everyone, that is,
except the ultra-rich, the people who reaped most of the rewards from the speculative
bubbles that triggered the crash in the first place. They are described as “job
creators” who must be exempted from the general belt-tightening.

But they are not creating jobs—corporate America is currently sitting on
something like $2 trillion in liquid assets, and businesses around the world are canceling
orders, trimming payrolls and shrinking inventories in preparation for the coming storm.
The jobs that have been shed over the past few years have, on the whole, been relatively
well-paid compared to those that have been created—many of which are only casual or
part-time. Right now the total real unemployment rate in the U.S. stands at
roughly 20 percent and is likely to get worse. Capitalists only “create jobs”
and expand their operations when they see an opportunity to turn a profit—and at
this point, with all economic indicators pointing down, that day seems a long way off.

The long string of capitalist victories over labor during the past few decades has
produced a global economy with unprecedented levels of inequality. On 1 July 2011, the
Associated Press reported: “Workers’ wages and benefits make up 57.5 percent
of the economy, an all-time low. Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably
stable—about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.” This provides a rough
index of how unevenly the pain has been distributed so far.

Origins of the Crisis

The roots of the current crisis can be traced to a pronounced decline in the rate of
profit beginning in the mid-to-late-1960s—a decline related to the growth of what
Karl Marx called the organic composition of capital (see articles in 1917 Nos.31
and 32). The capitalist offensive launched in the 1970s aimed at improving profitability
by weakening unions, pushing down wages and wresting back concessions made in the
post-World War II period. The smashing of the U.S. air traffic controllers’ union in
1981 and the defeat of the British miners’ strike a few years later represented
significant milestones in this campaign. Hobbling the traditionally protectionist unions
also made it easier to push through a series of “neoliberal” trade agreements
to increase capital mobility and gain greater access to the economies of many
“underdeveloped” nations.

Soon major corporations began moving production facilities from the
“advanced” to “newly industrializing” countries to take advantage
of lower wages, lower taxation rates and the absence of environmental and other
regulations. Workers in the imperialist countries were told that they needed to make
concessions in wages, benefits and working conditions in order to remain
“competitive.” In auto and other industries that remained in the
“advanced” capitalist countries, heavy investment in robotics and
computerization simultaneously increased productivity and reduced the workforce.

The deregulation of transport, communications and, most importantly, finance was
another significant aspect of the neoliberal turn of the 1980s. Exchange controls were
abandoned and restrictions on issuing credit eased. An increasing percentage of economic
activity involved “financial services”—paper shuffling—rather than
the production of new value in the form of actual goods and services. In the U.S. the
percentage of corporate profit accruing to the financial sector quadrupled—from less
than 10 percent in 1980 to roughly 40 percent by 2007. Manufacturing output tripled during
the same period, but as a share of total GDP it fell by a third—from 21 to 13
percent. Today total U.S. public and private debt is estimated at $57
trillion—roughly four times the national income. Eighty percent of this debt, which
works out to $185,000 for every man, woman and child, has been accumulated since 1990.

The 2008 banking crisis grew directly out of the preceding housing bubble and the
fraudulent “securities” and financial instruments associated with it. Mortgage
companies vied with one another to issue what insiders referred to as “NINJA”
loans—NINJA borrowers had “No Income, No Job and No Assets.” Of course
no one would loan money to such people…unless somebody else assumed the risk. And
that’s how it worked. The dubious mortgages were sold to investment banks, which
bundled them together into bonds and resold them to hedge funds as high-interest
“mortgage-backed securities.” Mortgage-backed securities had traditionally
been pretty safe investments—because the banks and trust companies issuing them were
on the hook in the case of a default. So they were rather careful about who got a loan for
how much.

In the new “financialized” economy, the hedge funds bought “credit
default swaps” (a form of insurance) to cover the risk of default. At every step the
issuers of these various pieces of paper collected substantial fees and, as long as the
housing bubble kept inflating and prices kept rising, everything was fine, because the
loans could be refinanced to take advantage of higher valuations. All of these
“financial instruments” were certified as Triple A investment grade after
supposedly being carefully evaluated by credit ratings agencies (which were hired by the
investment bank that issued them in the first place). When the bubble burst, a lot of
people lost their homes, but the debts remain, and the interest charges keep piling up.
Clearly much of this behavior was consciously fraudulent—but when the perps are
billionaires, it is unusual to see them being held to account.

The easing of credit that produced the housing bubble helped offset the fall in real
wages that had begun in the 1970s, but inequality continued to grow and has today reached
unprecedented levels. Government fiscal policy aimed at restoring capitalist profitability
played a role. During the past decade expenditures on “homeland security” and
military adventures abroad pushed up costs, while tax breaks for those at the top
simultaneously reduced revenues. In a column written a few months ago, Mark Bittman of
the New York Times observed that while a quarter of American children go to bed
hungry at least some of the time:

“The richest 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all
American households combined, the effective tax rate on the nation’s richest
people has fallen by about half in the last 20 years, and General Electric [GE] paid zero
dollars in U.S. taxes on profits of more than $14 billion.”—New York Times, 29 March 2011

How is that possible? Well, GE’s tax department has a staff of 975 and spends an
additional $20 million a year on outside lobbyists, most of whom specialize in helping
write tax legislation. And, of course, GE is just one of many corporations doing
essentially the same thing.

By the way, guess who President Obama appointed to head his “Council on Jobs and
Competitiveness”? None other than GE Chairman Jeffrey Immelt, whose personal
“compensation package doubled to $15.2 million last year, while this year, GE is
seeking major concessions from the unions that represent its shrinking American
workforce” (San Francisco Chronicle, 5 April 2011).

Financial Engineers’: Glorified Paper Shufflers

As the housing bubble was expanding, there was a lot written about the genius of the
“financial engineers” who designed these innovative new products, and the
notion was floated that perhaps we had somehow arrived in a “post-industrial
society” in which money made money. But in fact, debt and accumulated interest are
nothing but claims on real goods and services produced by actual working people. Some of
what is produced must necessarily be used to replace the human and material inputs
consumed in the production process, and so the magnitude of what remains constitutes the
absolute limit on aggregate industrial and financial profits. This value is fixed, not
infinitely expandable. The contraction of the financial system was inevitable, and the
largely fictitious profits suddenly evaporated as the whole ponzi scheme began to
unwind.

Among the first banks to fail when the September 2008 financial crisis broke were those
of tiny Iceland. When the island’s conservative rulers proposed to cover the
bankers’ bad debts, the resulting explosion of popular anger brought down the
government. The new social-democratic administration sought to push through the same
policy. But again the resistance was so great that the government ultimately backed down
and let the banks go bust. Nothing too radical really, but several leading financiers were
charged with criminal activity, and creditors and bondholders ended up getting a rather
severe “haircut.”

Iceland has been the exception, however. In virtually every other jurisdiction, the
state stepped in to honor the claims made by the holders of “toxic” assets. In
the U.S., the bankers got a $700 billion bailout with which to “recapitalize.”
Presented as absolutely essential to stabilizing the economy, this was effectively a
lifeline to the biggest speculators.

While the bankers immediately celebrated by paying themselves hefty bonuses, the U.S.
government proceeded to finance the expanded deficit by increased borrowing (in some cases
from the very same institutions that had just received the handout). The parasites who run
the financial houses began to express concern that perhaps the government would not be
able to continue to cover its expanding debt, and last month Standard & Poor’s
downgraded the U.S. government’s credit rating a notch for failing to tackle
“structural issues” with sufficient aggressiveness. In particular, the ratings
agency complained that the government was proposing “only minor policy changes on
Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most
other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability.”

Serving & Protecting Corporate Speculators

In pitching his “Jobs Bill” to Congress earlier this month, Obama, whom the
trade-union bureaucracy has backed as the supposed defender of working people and the
poor, openly talked about “reforming” (i.e., shredding) what remains of the
U.S. “social safety net” (i.e., Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security).

Every call to “rescue” Greece, Italy or the Bank of America from default is
in fact a proposal to protect wealthy speculators from taking a hit. Bank
“rescues” have two stages: first, transfer outstanding liabilities to the
public and, second, announce that workers, students and pensioners are going to have to
sacrifice in order to balance the budget. As Richard Wolff, writing in the
Guardian on New Year’s Day [2011], aptly observed: “Like someone
convicted of murdering his parents who demands leniency as an orphan, corporate America
demands conservative government and austerity on the grounds of excessive budget
deficits.”

What we are seeing in Europe and North America today parallels the “Structural
Adjustment Programs” imposed by the IMF [International Monetary Fund] in many
“underdeveloped” capitalist countries in the 1980s—where massive state
borrowing (much of which ended up in the pockets of the elites) was paid off by lowering
the standard of living of most of the population. The resulting social upheavals were
routinely dismissed in the Western press as “IMF rioting.”

A Gallup poll released just this week showed that Americans favor increasing taxes on
the rich and corporations by a margin of more than two-to-one. In February 2011, the
University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation released a study showing
that the three most popular proposals for reducing the federal deficit were: 1. cutting
the Defense Department budget; 2. cutting spending for the occupation of Iraq and
Afghanistan; and 3. cutting funding for the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The same
study found approval for increased funding for job training, education and environmental
protection (Marketplace Morning Report, 17 February 2011).

Such sentiments, which are nothing more than ideas about how to improve capitalism, are
too radical to be discussed seriously by the mainstream media. Only a mass popular
radicalization on a scale capable of destabilizing capitalist rule would put them on the
agenda for the bourgeoisie. This was the context for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s
“New Deal” in the 1930s. Today, with the rate of profit severely depressed and
no immediate threat posed by a potentially insurgent workers’ movement, even mildly
“progressive” reforms are off the agenda.

Imperialist ‘Right to Plunder’

All wings of the U.S. ruling class agree that American military supremacy is their most
important competitive advantage. It was not under George W. Bush, but Bill Clinton, that
the U.S. Secretary of State brazenly asserted that America has an inherent right to the
“unilateral use of power” to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets,
energy supplies and strategic resources” (johnpilger.com, 1 November 2004).

That, in a nutshell, sums up the motive for imperialist military intervention abroad.
Naturally, for public relations purposes, the pursuit of “national interests”
(i.e., corporate interests) has to have a more transcendent rationale. When George W. Bush
invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, he was acting to “protect the homeland.”
President Obama likes to cultivate a more “humanitarian” image, and so for
Libya we heard about “RTP”—the “Responsibility to Protect.”
But in fact, as usual, it was the “Right to Plunder.” Lesser imperialist
powers allied with Washington (like Britain, France, Germany, Australia and Canada)
participate in particular ventures to a greater or lesser extent, depending on how they
calculate the risks and benefits.

There is of course no guarantee that attempts to forcibly seize “energy supplies
and strategic resources” will succeed. The total cost to the U.S. Treasury of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may top $3 trillion by some estimates. Some well-meaning
people suggest that money currently being spent on the Afghanistan conflict should instead
be spent on reconstruction at home. Such notions reveal profound illusions about the
nature of capitalist rule. The U.S., Canada and the rest of the NATO axis have not spent
the last decade trying to establish control of Afghanistan because they care about
liberating women, or providing clean drinking water or economic opportunities for Afghans.
They have spent blood and treasure in pursuit of significant material interests.

NATO’s Strategic Defeats in Afghanistan & Iraq

During the recent self-righteous commemorations of “9/11” there was little
mention of the fact that Osama bin Laden and the other core cadres of Al Qaeda were
originally recruited, trained and equipped by the CIA in the 1980s to fight a
Soviet-supported nationalist regime committed to modernizing Afghan society. The
Soviets’ withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 touched off years of bloody internecine
conflict among the various gangs of mujahedin “freedom fighters,”
which only ended when the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, emerged on top in 1996.

Washington initially welcomed the Taliban as a stabilizing factor in a region that had
become much more strategically important after huge oil and natural gas deposits were
discovered in the vicinity of the Caspian Sea. The Taliban’s brutally repressive,
misogynist, theocratic rule was not a problem—but its lack of subservience soon
chilled relations. The 9/11 attacks provided the opportunity to launch a “War on
Terror” that began with the invasion of Afghanistan. The idea was to use it as the
launching pad for a string of imperialist military bases across what had formerly been
Soviet Central Asia.

But things did not work out as planned. Despite a decade of helicopter gunships,
hi-tech drones, Hellfire missiles and B-1 bombers, the NATO coalition has been unable to
either subdue the Taliban fighters or assert effective control of Afghan society. In fact,
a few weeks ago they were having difficulty hanging on to the U.S. embassy. At this point,
therefore, in a strategic sense, we can say that NATO has lost the war in Afghanistan. As
revolutionary internationalists we welcome this setback. We give no political support
whatsoever to the Islamic reactionaries of the Taliban, but we welcome the defeat of the
NATO imperialists and their puppets.

After invading Afghanistan, the next stop for the U.S.-led “War on Terror”
was the invasion of Iraq. (Because of domestic political calculations, Canada’s
Liberal government officially sat that one out, but contributed what it could.) In Iraq,
as in Afghanistan, it proved much easier to depose the existing regime than to establish
effective control over a hostile population. Revolutionaries opposed the occupation of
Iraq from the beginning and, as in Afghanistan, defended all blows struck against the
occupiers and their hirelings by indigenous resistance forces. In Iraq, as in Afghanistan,
the imperialist crusaders have failed to achieve their central strategic
objective—the creation of a stable client regime to provide a base for the direct
military control of the enormous oil resources of the region.

Humanitarian’ Bombing of Libya

NATO’s most recent “humanitarian” mission was to provide logistical
and military support to what the capitalist press hails as the “Libyan
Revolution.” As we noted in a statement published at the time, unlike the uprisings
in Tunisia and Egypt which were more or less spontaneous in origin and directed against
long-time imperialist clients, the Libyan revolt was initiated by a group with a
longstanding connection to the CIA. Right from the start, the imperialists clearly saw the
“Libyan Revolution” as an opportunity for “regime
change”—i.e., getting rid of Muammar Qaddafi. It is worth recalling that in
2002 a leaked Pentagon document had Libya on the list of seven potential targets for a
nuclear first strike. The others were China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Syria and Iraq
(Daily Mirror [London], 11 March 2002).

Qaddafi originally came to power in a 1969 coup which overthrew the pro-imperialist
monarchy headed by King Idris. He quickly moved to close British military installations at
Tobruk and El Adem and also kicked the U.S. Airforce out of the Wheelus base near Tripoli,
which had served as part of the Strategic Air Command encirclement of the Soviet Union.
After the Americans departed, Qaddafi invited the Soviets to use the base. Over the years
his regime also gave substantial material support to a wide variety of
“anti-imperialist” movements, including the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Provisional Irish Republican
Army.

The Qaddafi regime also nationalized Libya’s oil resources. This was depicted as
a “socialist” measure, but in fact, like the nationalizations carried out by
Nasser in Egypt, or more recently by Chávez in Venezuela, it was a case of the
state acting on behalf of a weak national capitalist class. The relative autonomy enjoyed
by Qaddafi and other left-nationalist regimes in the 1970s and 80s was largely due to the
existence of the Soviet counterweight to NATO. With the victory of capitalist
counterrevolution under Boris Yeltsin in August 1991, that changed.

There is no question that Col. Qaddafi ruled a rather nasty police state. But this is
not why he was on the imperialist hit list. Libya sits on the biggest oil reserves in
Africa, and Libyan oil is of a particularly high grade—which makes it extremely
profitable. Under Qaddafi’s rule, a substantial portion of oil revenues went into
domestic development projects, which is why Libya scored relatively high on the UN’s
Human Development Index of literacy, life expectancy and standard of living.
Qaddafi’s only real “crime” from the standpoint of imperialism was
insubordination and a tendency to what the U.S. State Department calls “resource
nationalism.” Had he been a more reliable agent of foreign oil corporations, he
would very likely still be in his palace in Tripoli.

One of the first acts of Libya’s “revolutionaries” was to call for
NATO intervention. When Qaddafi’s regime failed to immediately implode, NATO
commenced its “humanitarian” bombing to complement the special forces
dispatched to lead the “rebels.” The legal cover for this unprovoked attack on
a sovereign nation was a UN Security Council motion claiming that Qaddafi’s forces
were intent on killing large numbers of civilians. But as Richard Haass, president of the
U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, commented: “The evidence was not persuasive that
a large-scale massacre or genocide was either likely or imminent.”

Donald Trump, speaking to Fox News, explained the Libyan mission as follows: “We
are NATO. We back NATO in terms of money and weapons. What do we get out of it? Why
won’t we take the oil?” Why not indeed? The lead story in the business section
of the New York Times (23 August 2011) the day after the “rebels”
arrived in Tripoli was “Scramble Begins for Access to Libya’s Oil.” The
article observed that “Western nations—especially the NATO countries that
provided crucial air support to the rebels—want to make sure their companies are in
prime position to pump the Libyan crude.”

Of course, as George W. Bush discovered in Iraq, it is sometimes easier to declare
victory than to achieve it, particularly as many of the rebels employed by NATO to fight
Qaddafi’s army turn out to be Islamic radicals with a history of connections with Al
Qaeda. So the story may not be over just yet.

Like the disastrous speculative bubbles created by the “banksters,” the
predatory imperialist attacks on insufficiently obedient neocolonial regimes are ventures
in which costs are socialized, while benefits are privatized. The across-the-board
austerity measures being imposed on working people throughout the “developed”
capitalist world, like the vicious attacks on uncooperative neocolonies abroad, do not
result from mistaken policy choices or the short-sightedness of individual politicians.
The brutal Bush/Cheney “shock and awe” rhetoric has given way to Obama’s
sonorous “humanitarian” banalities, but the fundamentals remain unchanged.

That is because capitalism has a logic—the interests of the many will always be
sacrificed for the few at the top. Ordinary people lose their homes; daycares and schools
are closed; pension funds are looted; wages slashed and public assets privatized—all
so that bankers and other speculators don’t have to take a “haircut” on
their bad investments.

The continuing assault on working-class living standards has been met with considerable
resistance to date—from the spontaneous outpouring we saw in Wisconsin last winter,
to the repeated militant mass strikes waged by Greek workers. Today, the supposedly
“class neutral” capitalist state—which actually functions as the
“executive committee of the bourgeoisie”—is seen by tens of millions of
working people as nothing but a weapon wielded by the privileged and well-connected to
destroy gains painfully accumulated over generations. It is a short step from this
recognition to understanding that any serious resistance to these encroachments must
necessarily pose the question of power.

Capitalists’ Nightmare—the ‘Revival of Marxism’

The massive disorders that erupted across England last summer revealed a disintegrating
society with a generation of angry and despairing youth who feel they have no future and
therefore nothing to lose. Britain’s rulers claimed to have been shocked, but in
fact planning had been underway for such outbursts for some time. A 2007 document produced
by the British military projected the likely consequences of growing social
inequality:

“[T]he gap between rich and poor will probably increase and absolute
poverty will remain a global challenge….Absolute poverty and comparative disadvantage
will fuel perceptions of injustice among those whose expectations are not met, increasing
tension and instability, both within and between societies and resulting in expressions of
violence such as disorder, criminality, terrorism and insurgency.”—”The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme,
2007-2036,” 3rd ed., British Ministry of Defence, January 2007

The same report discussed the likelihood of “the resurgence of not only
anti-capitalist ideologies, possibly linked to religious, anarchist or nihilist movements,
but also to populism and the revival of Marxism.”

The revival of Marxism on a mass scale would be a very welcome development,
particularly given the extremely degenerate quality of most ostensibly Marxist groups
today. In 2008, the U.S. Communist Party, like much of the international left, called for
workers to support Obama and the Democrats. In 2010, the self-proclaimed “hard
communists” of the Spartacist League (the Trotskyist League up here) spent a few
months avidly alibiing the American military occupation of Haiti. When NATO attacked Libya
this year, many leftists, including the International Marxist Tendency (who are meeting
down the hall) and the French Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste, one of the biggest “far
left” groups in Europe, openly supported the imperialist-backed
“rebels.”

Yet the squalid opportunism of many who claim Marx’s legacy cannot detract from
the profound insights regarding the inner contradictions of the capitalist mode of
production contained in Das Kapital. In recent months, a few prominent bourgeois
thinkers have made favorable references to Marx’s magnum opus. Nouriel Roubini, a
New York University economics professor (known on Wall Street as “Dr. Doom”
for correctly predicting the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble and the consequences for
the American financial system years before it occurred) mentioned Marx in an interview
with the Wall Street Journal last month. Roubini observed that Marx was right
about the inherent tendency of capitalism toward cyclical crises, and commented: “At
some point capitalism can…destroy itself. That’s because you can not keep on
shifting income from labor to capital without…having an excess capacity and a lack
of aggregate demand. We thought that markets work. They are not working. What’s
individually rational…is a self-destructive process” (International Business
Times, 14 August 2011).

Contrary to Roubini, who is no Marxist, capitalism will not simply destroy itself. And
neither can it be fixed by tinkering with tax policy or heftier injections of stimulus.
The pathologies manifest in economic crises and neocolonial wars are expressions of the
profound irrationality of capitalist society. The pursuit of profit maximization has not
only produced extreme social polarization and immense human suffering, but it also
threatens the entire biosphere upon which life itself depends. The melting of the polar
ice caps, the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the nuclear catastrophe at
Fukushima (which has now released more than 20 times as much radiation as the bomb that
destroyed Hiroshima in 1945) can all be traced to the drive to enhance “shareholder
value.”

The irrationality of the global capitalist order can only be transcended through the
expropriation of the ruling class and the reorganization of the means of transport,
communication and production into an integrated planned economic system on a world scale.
This cannot be accomplished without a series of convulsive social
struggles—socialist revolutions—that rips power from the hands of the
capitalist class, smashes their coercive state agencies and institutes a new social order
in which production is organized on the basis of meeting human need.

The essential precondition for such a transformation is the creation of a revolutionary
party deeply rooted among the workers and oppressed. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917
proved that with such a leadership ordinary working people are capable of reorganizing
society from top to bottom. It is this example that we of the International Bolshevik
Tendency look to, and it is to this project that we seek to recruit a new generation of
revolutionary fighters.